Stan Karp on No Child Left Behind, Aaron Swartz on Rachel Carson

The White House is starting a drive to renew its No Child Left Behind law. While it’s politically safe nowadays to raise questions about any number of White House policies, for some reason No Child Left Behind manages to get a free ride from the media establishment. Why is that, and what would a critique of the law sound like? We’ll talk it over with Stan Karp, an editor at the magazine Rethinking Schools.

Also on the show today: Was environmentalist Rachel Carson a mass murderer? That alarming claim is actually being made by a coterie of individuals and groups, who say that Carson’s effort to ban the pesticide DDT is now killing African people. It’s a tidy anti-environmental argument; what’s behind it? We’ll talk with writer Aaron Swartz, who looked into the story for FAIR’s magazine, Extra!.

[…] Among many other things, Aaron was a terrific media critic, and Extra! is proud to have published a couple of his pieces. His article "Rachel Carson, Mass Murderer?," from September/October 2007, debunked the canard that concern over the environmental effects of pesticides is responsible for millions of human deaths. (The New Yorker's Caleb Crain, in an appreciation of Aaron–1/13/13–called the piece "intelligent and heartfelt," saying it helped him start thinking of its author as "a new kind of public intellectual.") You can hear Aaron discussing his Rachel Carson piece on CounterSpin (10/12/07). […]